St. Paul Pioneer Press tech blog by Julio Ojeda-Zapata

Your Tech Weblog

St. Paul Pioneer Press tech blog by Julio Ojeda-Zapata

Torchlight Parade in ‘virtual reality’

The Pioneer Press’ T.C. Rover takes part in the St. Paul Winter Carnival’s Torchlight Parade every year … but this year the minivan had a weird gizmo installed in the front, atop a tall pole.

The roughly spherical rig incorporates slots into which GoPro cameras are inserted.

The cams then shoot in unison. Afterwards, the various videos are “stitched” together.

The result is a 360-degree or virtual-reality video that can be viewed in all directions. Users can pan left and right, and up and down, using a mouse on their computers, or a fingertip on a mobile-device screen.

What’s more, they can rotate their smartphones around them while looking at the screens to, essentially, experience the video as a window into a different world. As the phone changes position, the perspective of the video shifts accordingly.

Even better, the video can be viewed using virtual-reality goggles (such as inexpensive Google Cardboard versions) for a more realistic, immersive effect.

It’s like you’re there. Peering in all directions with the VR goggles, you pretty much are.

Here’s the video:

For best results on a mobile device, such as an iPhone or an Android phone, be sure to watch it using Google’s YouTube app. Sadly, the iPhone version of the YouTube isn’t Cardboard-compatible just yet, but on an Android phone the VR effect is amazing.

To watch the Torchlight Parade video on your Android phone, fire up sequence in the YouTube app, look for a little icon that looks like a set of goggles, and tap that icon. The video will split into two, with versions for the left and the right eyes. This is your cue to slip your phone into your Cardboard for virtual-reality viewing.

Lots of other VR videos are posted on YouTube. 360 video also works on Facebook. The Vrideo site has a ton of such content, too (including a version of the Torchlight Parade video).

Visual has shot a number of other cool VR videos. Here are a bunch of them in a YouTube playlist:

Chuck can do some additional, wacky stuff with the virtual-reality video he shoots. It can be molded into a variety of formats, such as “tiny planet” imagery. You’ve never seen downtown St. Paul like this.